Objectively you sound very successful and like you’ve really got your shit together! Not everyone at your age is as successful as you are! You should be proud of what you have accomplished from working hard. I’m sorry that your girlfriend’s family are assholes. The road to success does not look the same for everyone. People find their way in the world in different ways and that’s ok. I hope your girlfriend is supportive of you.

Maybe you might want to try out a different perspective. Because weirdly, being an adult can give you the freedom of being more childlike.

Think of it this way…as a child, no matter what kind of home life you had, abusive or not, you had to go to school for much of the day. As an adult, the same thing applies. Except now you’ll be at work instead of school. So realistically, that part is actually the same if that makes sense. The time each takes out of your day is roughly equivocal.

Ok. So then where does that take us? The time spent during work or school is similar. So now the real differences are going to come outside of work/school.

As a kid, what happened outside of school? Your life was hell. You didn’t get to play and do kid things the way a normal kid does.

Aa an adult, what happens outside of work? Believe it or not, you can do whatever the fuck you want.

That’s right.

Want ice cream for dinner? Fuck it, you’re an an adult and can do what you want. Want to buy some toys and play with them? Fuck it, you’re an adult and can do what you want. Want to climb a tree? Fuck it, you’re an adult and can do what you want.

Use the now to live the childhood you didn’t have. Difference is instead of spending your non play time at school, you’ll just be at work instead, earning your own money to do whatever the fuck you want. :)

Best of luck.

Some card companies don’t boost it automatically. I had the same credit card for like 8 years. Always paid it off in full each month and used the card very often as it is my primary card. I had an incredibly low credit limit of like $1k and was hoping when in the world they would ever increase it since it had been literal years and years of frequent usage and on time payments.

Yeah turns out I just had to ask and they increased it. Then only a few months later I asked for another increase and they increased it again to a much better number. So I mean it’s not automatic at all companies, but they seem pretty open to raising it if you pay on time like you said.

Hope you’re having a fun time lol

I mean…I’m old enough and have tried on and off for years at this point that that advice isn’t particularly helpful. Maybe if I was in my teens or twenties, sure. But people say things like “oh you’re just a late bloomer” or “oh you’ll just figure it out, it comes naturally” have never been all that helpful to me.

Vulva/vagina

I’ve tried various different areas. If there is some sort of secret technique that everyone just magically knows, I could never figure it out.

Goddamn I wish I could. People describe it as pleasurable and then relaxing. But I’ve never been able to do it. It’s like either the nerve endings aren’t hooked up right or there is some sort of brain defect, but I lack the ability for pleasure there, myself.

Sorry, I’m not the OP.

You got this!

That seems rather counterproductive imo. The only way to get useful results on any search engine is to input “reddit” at the end of your search ime. So it seems like it’s limiting the discovery and knowledge base of things here by not allowing for the same thing for Lemmy. Idk how to word that correctly.

Sms, calls, discord, Google voice, work emails (I rarely get a work email…maybe a couple of times per month)

I have my personal Gmail to get silent notifications so I know if something happened but I’m not repeatedly spammed.

Most other things are off unless they are unobtrusive. Ex: my robot vacuum stays enabled for notifications so I know when it is done cleaning, Uber eats is enabled for order tracking but disabled for promotions

I’m not sure why any of this is somehow a red flag. Your partner is going to be dating you, not your family.

Maybe my experience isn’t the norm, but I find that a significant portion of people I meet have fucked up families.

Yes, people often ask about families when meeting each other, but it’s perfectly fine and common enough ime to say that you aren’t close with/don’t have a good relationship with one or multiple family members.

My advice would be to keep it brief and somewhat vague at first…just stating what I said above should be sufficient enough. You’re getting to know each other, but you’re not there to learn every single intimate detail about every moment of someone’s life. Don’t go into a long tirade or story about anything at first. Over time, you will get to know each other and can slowly talk about more bits and pieces with time.

Thank you for your kind words. One of my siblings did end up going no contact with my father, actually. I don’t really agree with the particular way he went about it (long story), but I more than support the outcome tbh.

Honestly, I feel like there was an opportunity I had during the divorce where it would have made sense for me to go no contact with him. But he was very good at trying to make me feel bad for him at the time (I mean, we are all only human after all), and he even went and unprompted bought me a fucking car. I actually was going to refuse it, but was convinced otherwise. Through the years I’ve found that the interactions between my father and I can be mutually beneficial in their own ways, though I feel bad at times because I view what he did as unforgivable honestly.

We moved across the country from him and it has been nice that way for several years…I only see him a couple times per year. The frustrating part is he plans to move to my part of the country when he retires next year. I’ve repeatedly tried to reiterate to him that I am not going to suddenly see him every week because he moves here, but he doesn’t seem to get the message. Honestly I’m at a loss as to what to do when that eventually occurs. Part of me kind of wishes he’ll die before then so I won’t have to worry about it.

Anyway, I know you didn’t ask for that, but I appreciate the time you’ve taken and the words you’ve spent.

I mean, here’s another thought…

A lot of animals in the wild stink. Seriously. Check out a farm or a zoo. It’s quite possible that people just used to generally smell bad before the modern age.

But I guess a positive to this is, you know how you get used to a smell if you’re around it all the time? Like say you eat McDonald’s in your car on a long car journey. Nothing is out of the ordinary smell wise to you. But then you get to your destination and leave your car for a few days. You come back and notice it smells like shitty old McDonald’s because you had been away from it for a bit. What I’m getting at is if we were around stinky people all day we maybe weren’t bothered by it as much because you can go “nose blind” to that sort of thing after being exposed to it often.

It’s interesting how many people don’t realize this. We were having a casual discussion one day and one of the smartest people I know, who has been educated in a lot of science, didn’t realize that neutral or even outright negative traits can occur and persist in evolution. Evolution doesn’t create a perfect being. It’s just creates those that can survive long enough to reproduce better than those that can’t do it as well.

No one knows. It’s a diagnosis of exclusion. It’s a lot more common in infants (although still relatively uncommon), and significantly less common in kids. There are some types of conditions that you can’t really tell at autopsy though. So if the heart suddenly starts beating out of whack or if someone had a seizure, there is not necessarily going to be evidence of that for you to know what happened, unfortunately.

What the fuck. I mean, it’s terrible already but to have the fucking balls to just do that out in the open??? The fuck??

Possibly was listening to my sweet mom crying and softly begging my dad to stop raping her in the other room. I was in denial about it tbh. He was a verbally abusive man, but I never knew that it extended to anything physical. He was not shy about screaming at her in front of us kids, so I honesty didn’t think I was correctly interpreting what I was hearing at the time. Both my patients were very quiet during this event. So I’m not sure how often it happened. I didn’t help my mom or anything at the time like an asshole…I just wasn’t sure what really happened.

It was only many years later when I stumbled across some PDF files of divorce paperwork where she stated that he would rape her. She chose much softer language in the paperwork, carefully avoiding the “r-word”, but I knew she wasn’t lying because of what I remembered. She did say that he often wasn’t very physically “successful” at it, which I guess is a bit more comforting? Anyway, this absolutely and totally enraged me. I fantasized about ways I would torture this man. But alas I never did anything of use and continue to allow this man to speak to me and spend time with me. I’m an asshole for it, really.

Much less significant, but there was also a time where my brother repeatedly tried to record videos of me naked and didn’t stop even after he got caught. That was such an intense violation of my privacy and permanently changed the way I feel about him and view him tbh. We have an ok relationship now, but I’ll never forget it.

Life is short and it’s also a balance. It’s ok to buy yourself something fun from time to time. :) The key to anything is moderation.

So I am from the northern US. I was speaking to someone from the southern US and they said the word “cement”. I had to do a double take and think hard about what they were saying. To me, it sounded like she was saying “semen”. I am basically a child and thought it was hilarious.